ABSTRACT
Deism is a religious position that was common among European and American intellectuals during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It extolled the virtues of a universalistic natural religion and condemned revealed religion-especially Christianity-for its alleged parochialism and irrationality. Deists believed that the universe was governed by mathematically perfect natural laws, that it was created by a benevolent and rational Deity, that all people, past and present, had an equal capacity for rational thought, and that the true religion was a “natural religion,” accessible to all through the rational intellect and the empirical study of nature. The moral agenda of the deists often played a greater part in their anti-Christian polemics than did their views on nature and philosophy, but both the moral and the scientific issues were important components of their worldview. In essence, deism arose out of an intersection of the new science and an anti-Christian moral sensibility.
